Word: thoreau
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With our school days and our assimilation nearing completion, we've changed our minds about Thoreau more than once, and it's even questionable as to whether a nonconformist is wearing sheep's clothing. Rather than dwelling on that grown-up paradox, think of childhood, when the behavioral variations weren't quite so polar. That such a diversity of functioning in childhood exists may help to explain childhood cruelty--a cruelty that attempts to set standardized conventions, leaving no room for dissent...
...early. From the moment we can walk, we are carted all over the city for piano and swimming lessons, Sunday school and Boy Scout meetings. In high school, we add varsity sports, theater and the newspaper. Naturally, we are good students, and we fill our evenings with trigonometry and Thoreau. And so we arrive at Harvard, factory for the best and brightest. Spurred on by ghosts of centuries past, we run faster, reach farther and climb higher...
Paradoxically, she dabbles earnestly in photography, recording those surfaces that bewilder her so. She dreams of photographing Thoreau's Walden Pond and perhaps capturing a view of New England when "the world of ideas" still existed. Most of all, she wants to take a definitive picture of "the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto, whom I'd consulted and photographed" posing with his dog. Why? Because, with such a picture, "I would have the answer to the question of how to live in the world...
Caterpillar bulldozers have completely destroyed the sacred old dirt Indian footpath that leads (and lead Thoreau) along one whole side of the pond to Thoreau's hut. The trail has been grossly despoiled into what looks like the making of a one-lane highway. I counted 13 trees cut down at the water's edge in one 20-foot section...
...read Sarah J. Schaffer's call to action in the November 2 Dartboard ("Gandhi On a Mountain Bike") with great interest. It seemed that she would join such luminaries as Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King in opposing some great injustice. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the moral principle she upheld was the right to ride down pedestrians on the sidewalk...